post.(1)

The sound of quarters plunking into a jukebox... it was a sensory memory that a lot of adults these days didn't have, or at least not with the weight of routine that it used to carry. Like the feeling of resistance right before a tape was accepted into a deck, cassette or vhs. Like a rotary dial phone. Like untangling the spiral analog cord of one while you talked, or the exact engraved embossed feeling of a pay phone with the exact resistance of their buttons. Cars whose doors had to be slammed with a clunk, not that precise tupperware swoosh these days that gave the illusion of giving out if you put weight behind it. It was all akin to the difference it made drinking from real glass bottles, or glass tumblers maybe if you had ideas of being civilized.

Or if you were in a bar with a predilection for older things like this one.

Not that he couldn't have bought a bottle to himself without blinking. But after a while throwing money around just lost its luster. After you escaped the pretense that it changed you at all, you could grab the honesty that life before it had formed who you were.

And maybe, you admitted to yourself, just maybe it felt good to savor the ordinary and the nostalgic in routines, at least in the scarce places that patterns were safe anymore. Maybe you got your fill of attention burning an image into peoples' minds on a stage with the heat of spotlights on you and lava flowing through your veins that it was a welcome thing to be able to invert it and cool off. If he'd honed anything outside of violence and hedonism, it was drawing the curtain of inconspicuousness when he wanted it. He might stand six feet four inches, but there were plenty of tall guys walking around here, and he'd spent enough time as an awkward teenager taller than all his peers to know that slouch. Plenty of people with tattoos as well, so long as he had enough shirt sleeve to cover the nude Polyxena of Troy's icy dead eyes... and enough sense to keep his own off people directly so the hair on their necks wouldn't prickle. His hair was black, his features were damaged enough to not be immediately handsome nor broken enough to be eye-drawing, his skin was the kind of nondescript nonpasty shade that'd let him call himself Chavez or Vittori or Polinsky or Anoa'i or Gryaznov or Stratigos or Taşkıran or goddamned Alexander without questions.

And the jukebox might not have the old style buttons, those thick heavy plastic brothers to the pay phone's digits-- but that was fine. The man checking the touchscreen wasn't a Luddite by any stretch of the imagination. By the time he made it back to his barstool the twangy guitar had progressed far enough for Jerry Garcia's voice to ring through.



This place had shades of home in it. No, not the one in New York, definitely not. Not the one in Los Angeles, not the one in Las Vegas. Definitely not the one in Orlando. Like all real homes, they each had their own sprinklings of hell and heaven. No, the one in the song. The one in Dallas. That building down in Deep Ellum that had started life close to a hundred fifty years ago as a heavy brick traincar repair station, that'd had windows knocked in for the delicacy of stained glass windows of a church, then the makeshift stage and pit and balcony of a theater added in. That'd transitioned again into yet another life as a bar. Joan Jett had danced on its bar in the video for I Love Rock 'N Roll, and god hadn't it been weird to watch that video in color and actually recognize it for the first time, not to mention the realization that the leathers she'd been wearing were as bright red as arterial blood. The one he'd owned for a time, passed off on a friend, seen turn up on Queen of the South the other day as an exterior shot, sent him falling right down this nostalgia trip upon realizing he could never go back to that home; the location was burned security-wise.

God, he thought as he knocked back a shot of bourbon, he'd gone and gotten old. Not just the year count climbing, but mentally, emotionally. He'd never planned for this. At the start of this road, he hadn't been supposed to have to contemplate reaching double Jeannie's age without her. Hitting twenty seven without overdosing or getting kicked to death by the latest cop or thug he'd turned his wit on had been the goal. Twenty seven was respectable enough and it was infamous, that mark of a brilliant mind burning itself out or whatever the romantic notion was. That'd been the closest to a life goal. Never this. The opposite of this. He almost wanted to frame twenty seven as the point where he'd completely sold out and let the devils eat him alive, but the point of no return had doubtlessly been reached before that. His hands had gone stiff from hitting people in the face for a living before then, his face had been reformed by damage in kind to the point that he could go back to that first home and have nobody recognize him. Not that it mattered with as gentrified as it'd become; like Martin Blank said, you could never go home, but he guessed you could shop there.

No, he'd never daydreamed as a kid about being a professional fighter in front of a screaming crowd. Sure, he'd dreamed of getting out, of getting OUT, of going places and doing things that made a mark, but the mark he'd had in mind hadn't been bruises. He'd wanted to bid farewell to a life that brought those things around as regularly as the cockroaches, and he'd been told to stop being an idealistic fool because that was just how things flowed down here, to stop pretending to be better than the carnality. That sentiment repeated enough times had pissed him off. Then the fuse on all that bottled up anger had been lit, and it'd turned into self-fulfilling prophecy.

And now, he was sitting at a bar at thirty four with twice the amount of old injuries he should rightly have, downing bourbon straight like a man two decades his senior and feeling just about that age anyway. And professional fighting as an outlet for anger was now a total joke. Stepping onto a neatly cordoned off platform in front of a whole heap of people and live cameras and sticking by the rules and having a fair bout to settle a difference was screaming hilarious. Not only had the temper snowballed into a goddamned avalanche, but the build of it had left a deep trench of apathy that fenced him in all the rest of the time. It'd been building for a while but the whole last year he'd been phoning it in most of the time, provoking himself to get angry over the stupid professional disputes that the promoters latched onto and whored out. Beating his own head in to get out words for the spiel of campaign speeches, to sell a fucking match he just wanted to fight already, to a crowd he'd never ever related to, and to fire up an opponent who had ninety nine percent likely gotten into the line of work for the opposite sort of reasons from him. Baiting the fighting dogs with the silly little irritations that worked, that they'd try to repay in kind.

And then there were the moments when they did touch a nerve, and those were even worse. There were guys like Lex Collins, who he'd rather spit on and proceed to forget forever instead of taking a rematch to get back his last stolen title... and then there were guys like Smith Jones, who tapdanced on deeply personal buttons-- no, landmines-- and










and it wasn't the kind of anger these other wrestlers had. Not the anger that brought on grand speeches about accomplishing shit. Not even the ugh, fuck this noise anger that made them claim they gave no fucks and ragequit just to go to some other company and start the same inevitable bullshit cycle over again, unavoidable because that was what the industry was built on. It was







It was like being hit with an electrical whip in his brain. It was intense enough that it had its own physical sensation, like love made your stomach feel weird and sadness made your chest ache-- this was like chewing on a whole ball of tinfoil, but all over, all the time. It made you grit your teeth, stole your appetite, set up tension aches and muscle cramps. It was either this, or he couldn't fucking care to a degree far more indescribable.

It had come to a head with Smith Jones. Jones had knocked him out, driven him somewhere, and dumped him like a corpse-- just to get under someone else's skin without a second thought to what it might bring from him. Jones hadn't known about the incident in Los Angeles that had lead him to almost tear his own thumb off to escape. Jones had stumbled over a reminder of that, and the retribution for that kind of ugly misstep wasn't a fucking wrestling match. He'd finally reached the point where he could walk away from competitive fighting, or he could walk into that ring and literally murder a man on live television. Knock him stupid and instead of going for a headlock, pull a shiv out of his boot and slit through trachea and muscle till the blade warped and lodged in vertebrae and his hands were too slippery to pull it free. Go to prison forever, or whatever was left of it. He'd lived seven years past his expiration date anyway. He hadn't planned this far, he had no desire to try to plan for a decade or two in the future when he'd continued to wear his body down to the point where he couldn't walk or wipe his own ass anymore without help. He didn't have what it'd take to go into another course of life this late, neither the physical capacity nor the joie de vivre.

What he did still have was the compunction to weigh that imagining of kamikaze fuck-you rage through the eyes of who he'd been before all of this. Consult the silly kid who'd Johnny-Rotten-sneered at the thought that his destiny was to throw his weight around and make physical threats for the sake of some fucking money. The analysis brought one conclusion-- if he kept going he'd truly, completely have become the epitome of everything he'd despised half a life ago. That kid might've been dumb, but maybe he wasn't wrong on this one. Neil Young might have made a compelling argument for burning out instead of fading away, but not like this. He would take Bowie's Disco King over King Crimson's Schizoid Man.

He'd gone home. He'd walled in, disconnected from wrestling, fallen into a pattern of default settings that was apparently what was left when you took fighting away. He'd diminished. The finality of Bowie hadn't come; instead it'd been Carroll's eight fragments, deeper and deeper valleys, less and less light, impassable.

Two blips on the radar, things he'd almost missed. The first? An opportunity at finishing things right, in the perfect structure with the perfect person for the job and at the apex of the perfect stage. Cage of Death, or at least Brytain's version of it, wasn't a match-- it was an event, which seemed to be the polite thing to label disasters these days. It was a thing that had claimed lives but hadn't, which was just the right sort of ambiguousness for him. He'd only been prodding at her regarding the idea of Cage of Death regularly for-- was it two years, or three?

And the second, in the meantime, was an offer from somebody he'd admired from afar for a while, for a place he'd been interested in but hadn't fit as a fighter. It was ideal because it wouldn't let him lapse back into apathy and disconnection from wrestling and he couldn't disconnect again if he wanted this finale to happen right. More than that, he'd be using his knowledge of his old business without actually having to compete or talk on cameras. And besides, it was in Louisiana, that place he'd always wanted to make a home but hadn't.

The detail that sealed the deal? Very few in this place knew him. It was a decent bit of a miracle, as many times as he'd stood on top of the world holding some of the most hotly-pursued gold-and-leather banners out there. Not a saint-level miracle, though; wrestling was essentially an overbloated industry with a lot of genres that moved quickly, it had been a couple of years, and Pure Amusement was simply a different circle.

It meant he could walk around the park and sit in this bar and drink bourbon without being disturbed or noticed, and on the stray chance he was? He wasn't in charge in a capacity that'd lead to workplace politics. Keep an eye on things. Fade without fading.

It would do for a piece. And in the outcome where Brytain Rollins didn't finish the job and he slithered free of death once again...